Cryptocurrency giants, Binance and Huobi, have saved the day again by freezing crypto funds linked to a $100 million horizon bridge hack from last June.
The notorious North Korean-based cybercrime outfit Lazarus group desperately resorted to attempting the use of privacy mixers to obfuscate the transactions. This is just one of their many successful heists. However, this particular attempt was futile.
Crypto Sleuths And Exchange Unite Against Cybercrime
About $1.4 million worth of crypto assets were frozen by the exchange platforms entered from accounts connected to the Lazarus group operating outside North Korea.
The investigations were carried out by the on-chain analytics company Elliptic. According to the report released on February 14, the firm did not specify details of which coins they held.
Elliptic explained that Binance and Huobi acted on their intel to freeze the digital assets linked to the group’s account.
“The stolen funds remained dormant until recently when our investigators began to see them funnelled through complex chains of transactions to exchanges. By promptly notifying these platforms about these illicit deposits, they were able to suspend these accounts and freeze funds.”
Surprisingly, this recovery was only a fraction of the $63.5 million laundered over that weekend. Crypto sleuth ZachXBT claimed that many of these funds were channelled from the Ethereum-based protocol, Railgun, before they were split across three crypto exchanges.
Will investigating crypto sleuths be enough to tackle the notorious South Korean group in the future? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
